Shall We Fly, Friends? Skydiving Photos

It was a hot day, ages ago. A bunch of green rookies arriving at an airfield near Chernihiv. They had these scary-as-hell, ancient planes waiting for us. "Kukuruzniks" (crop dusters), I think.

And we were about to jump out of them from a kilometer up.

First came the training. We jumped over car tires, learned how to land, and practiced pulling the right cords on the parachute.

Later on, I just pulled everything at once—turns out a couple of hours of ground school isn't quite enough. Besides, your brain completely reboots mid-air.

My landing wasn't exactly smooth. I hit the ground butt-first and then took a hard blow to the back of my head. Thank goodness I was wearing a helmet. The guys weren't given any; they had soft pilot caps, but the girls were handed rigid helmets, which were a rare luxury in those parts.

Lucky me: even with the helmet, I still managed to get a mild concussion. At the very least, I didn't just drop from the sky, I dropped straight into a dead faint. When I came to, the parachute was acting like a sail, dragging me across the ground. And suffocating me. With every yard, the lines bit tighter into my neck. You're supposed to unclip the chute immediately upon landing precisely to avoid this—but doing that while passed out is a bit of a challenge.

A guy who’d landed just ahead of me intervened and put an end to this BDSM-dragging. He pulled me out of the lines and untangled me. Looks like he was our resident Terminator-savior; either before or after me, he saved someone else the exact same way. Though he must have taken quite a beating himself.

Afterward, he lugged both our chutes off the field. I just couldn't—my legs were getting tangled, and I only had just enough strength to somehow trudge along behind him.

A beautiful memory. Wild impressions. Thankful for the experience.

Nelli Verkhovska PhD in Psychology For more on alternative relationships, check out my YouTube channel